Watch for a few Budget surprises

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says today’s Budget is predictable. She would say that. Under promising and over delivering is one of the oldest Budget tricks in the book. So expect Finance Minister Grant Robertson to have at least one or two surprises up his sleeve.

Where? Ardern’s acknowledgement yesterday that it’s not just the working poor, but the ‘‘squeezed’’ middle classes, who are hitting the wall financially drops a heavy hint about one of the big Budget surprises.

Expect there to be some big movement on GP visits, even if Labour has had to push back its previous promise of a $10-a-week drop in the cost of GP visits across the board to later years.

Families are the likely winners from a more ‘‘targeted’’ approach – and extending the current zero-fees scheme for children under 13 to cover all school age children would be one way of delivering to both low and middle-income earners at the same time.

But Ardern and Robertson will mostly be wanting this Budget to be remembered for a return to its core promises – so the emphasis will be on restoring the public service through big dollops of

OPINION:

extra cash in health and education, and a plan to significantly increase the number of state houses.

And while the Government can’t negotiate public sector pay rounds through the Budget, it could meet nurses, midwives and the teacher unions half way by promising some big increases in staffing levels to alleviate building pressure in both those areas. It has already signalled a big rise in police numbers and the pressure on staffing levels in hospitals in particular has become even more acute. No-one ever lost votes by promising more nurses and more teachers.

But what’s in the Budget is almost less important than how the Government sells it. Labour’s big blunder was letting the perception take root that its pledge on GP fees would have to make way for other spending, like the $1 billion boost to foreign affairs spending under NZ First leader and Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters.

Robertson will talk up the fact that he’s banking a bigger than expected surplus – thanks to an extra $1 billon in windfall revenue since the election – to demonstrate that’s not the case. But the narrative may already be set.

The Government also has to resell flagship policies from its pre-Christmas mini-budget – like the extension to working for families, paid parental leave, the $60-a-week Best Start programme for newborns and the year’s free tertiary study.

They all deliver big wins to the ‘‘working poor’’ and ‘‘squeezed middle’’ that Ardern identified with – but it feels like a lot of water has passed under the bridge since those measures were passed, and there’s another lag before many of those gains make it into people’s pockets, from July 1.

But there is huge symbolism in this being the first Labour budget in a decade and the party faithful will be looking to Robertson to ring the changes.

Which is why we can expect there will be one or two surprises tucked away.